Estado Sentido

Há uns anos debrucei-me sobre este tema, evidenciando como o próprio Rousseau demonstrou que a desigualdade é o motor de uma sociedade livre, numa das suas primeiras obras. A respeito desta temática, ler este artigo de Gary Becker, de onde saliento os seguintes parágrafos:

«Many people, especially academics and other intellectuals, would find the phrase “good inequality” jarring. They can hardly think of any aspect of inequality as being good. Yet a little thought makes clear that some types of economic inequality have great social value. For example, it would be hard to motivate most people to exert much effort, including creative effort, if everyone had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other rewards. Many fewer individuals would engage in the hard work involved in finishing high school and going on to college if they did not expect their additional education to bring higher incomes, better health, more prestige, and better opportunities to marry.

(...)

Although inequality in many developing and developed countries grew during the past thirty years, world income inequality actually declined. Credit this to a much more vigorous growth in per capita income in populous developing countries—Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia, for example—than in the rich Western countries and Japan. World poverty declined enormously, and so did the income gap between poorer and richer countries. Thus, a large decline in the bad kind of world inequality.»